1. Personal utility drives adoption

This is the first of a series of blog posts exploring some excellent research from social marketing agency Mr Youth. What's clear from their research is today's consumer have a brand new perspective on relationships, brands, technology and media. 

The key insights from the research were:

1. Personal utility drives adoption

People chooses to consume what they find useful in their lives over manufactured marketing needs
2. Authenticity trumps celebrity
People respond to honest, relevant messaging from peers over marketing speak and celebrity endorsements
3. Niches rule
People relish in choices and look for products and services that speak to them personally
4. Serve bite size communications
People digests short, personal and highly relevant messaging in bulk while growing increasingly adept at blocking out noise
5. Consumers own brands
People will speak about, repurpose and associate with your brand as they see fit

The first insight is a powerful statement about the impact of the internet on traditional marketing practices. This is best summed up 10 years ago in the precient book The Cluetrain Manifesto.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

If personal utility is driving brand adoption versus traditional marketing, the role and value of Service Design becomes critical because it aligns your brand experience to the needs and desires of people. A great example is Live/Works work for British car-share club called Street Car. 

Streetcar launched in 2004 with a great concept but a customer experience that needed to be radically improved if Streetcar was to realise its full potential. In order to persuade people to switch to this new way to using a car the customer experience had to be better than that of buying and owning your own car.

Live|work set about creating a customer experience that would enable Streetcar to meet their growth plans. They systematically resolved Streetcar’s key barriers to growth – lack of comprehension, access and usability. The service is now clearly communicated as a four-step process. Customers find joining easy through a quick call to Streetcar and the DVLA, and the online booking engine was rebuilt to make it both usable and exciting.

Due to a customer experience that is both seamless and consistently high quality, Streetcar is now the fastest growing car club in Europe with 30,000 members in 600 locations in 6 cities.

Faced with the question of how to engage your customers. To my mind it's clear a breath-taking consumer experience is the best advert you could ever write.

The next post will examine how 'authenticity trumps celebrity' and show how a basic blog can establish credibility and drive sales.